The crowd at the Glenn Beck rally keeps getting bigger.
 
Taking off from the original media estimates of “tens of thousands” or even “hundreds of thousands,” organizers put the number at around a half million. Beck himself put the number at between 300,000 and 650,000.
 
Minnesota Republican Michele Bachmann, at her own post-rally event, said it was no fewer than a million.
 
Now she is suggesting it could be as high as 1.6 million. Her source: an unnamed U.S. Park Police officer.
 
In an exchange picked up by Talking Points Memo, the congresswoman appeared on Laura Ingraham’s radio show earlier this week to discuss the rally and what it means and how the right is being demonized by what Bachmann called “these loonies on the left.”
 
On the post-rally numbers game, she added to her own outlier estimate by more than 50 percent:
 
"The crowds were overwhelming, and if you saw the aerials on the Drudge Report this weekend, there was an aerial photo,” Bachmann said. “Unofficially, off the record, we talked to one of the guys from the National Park Police who told us he thought it was 1.6 million. There had to be over a million people there. People were packed in from the Washington Monument all the way to the Lincoln Memorial. And for anyone who's ever been there, that's a huge area."
 
For the record, the government got out of the crowd estimate game in the mid-90s, after a similar controversy surrounding the Nation of Islam’s Million Man March.
 
The audio of the exchange is below: